Festivals: Black film, then and now - 'Within These Gate: American Race Films, 1918-1948,' 'Brought to Light: Black Cinema, 1921-1959,' and The Alcapulco Black Film Festival

American Visions, June-July, 1997 by Henry Chase

This summer, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City offers a rare retrospective survey of 19 of the hundreds of all-black-cast "race movies" that filled segregated cinemas during the years of Jim Crow. "Within Our Gates: American Race Films, 1918-1949" takes its name from the title of Oscar Micheaux's 1920 film, which was the director's response to D.W. Griffiths' ground-breaking The Birth of a Nation, a film whose flamboyant narrative was as racially prejudicial as its cinematography was revolutionary.

Typically portraying a black world that paralleled its white counterpart, "race" films mirrored the genres that dominated Hollywood. From religious melodramas (such as Micheaux's 1925 Body and Soul and Spencer Williams' 1941 The Blood of Jesus) to westerns (such as Herb Jeffries' 1938 Two Gun Man From Harlem), gangster and detective thrillers (Double Deal, 1939, and Dark Manhattan, 1937), comedies (Boy! What a Girl!, 1945, and Beware, 1946), family dramas (Moon Over Harlem, 1939, and Broken Strings, 1940) and musicals (Hi-De-Ho, 1947), these films reveal a country as sharply divided by race as it was broadly united by shared cultural norms, obsessions, fantasies and myths. (One of these shared obsessions was movies: Almost 700 segregated movie houses dotted America in the 1940s.)

The retrospective's 19 films were selected by Laurence Kardish, curator of film and video at the Museum of Modern Art, and James E. Wheeler, founder and director of Concept East II, Detroit, a nonprofit organization devoted to the preservation and presentation of African-American arts. of the films he helped select, The Blood of Jesus looms largest in Wheeler's mind, for it was the first movie he ever saw, as a 5-year-old in 1946, growing up in the small black community of Lumber, Ark. "My parents ran a juke joint," Wheeler fondly recalls, "and all-black films were shown in its cafe. I still remember first seeing Blood of Jesus -- it was so intensely realistic, so real, the people and the river baptisms looked so like Lumber. I never saw anything but all-black films until I moved North -- then I never saw another one."

Complementing "Within Our Gates" is Brought to Light: Black Cinema, 1921-1959." This exhibition of 42 posters and 44 lobby cards, heralds and press books (all from Wheeler's private collection) explores and celebrates early black filmmaking's presence in print. Then, as now, promotional materials featured the industry's most recognizable stars -- Paul Robeson and Anita Bush during black cinema's birth, and Herb Jeffries, Lena Horne and Dorothy Dandridge (the last two of whom made the transition to mainstream Hollywood productions) in later years. Both the black movies and the posters that promoted them underscore a profound truth, says Kardish: "You can hardly imagine a cinema that is more American than `race films.'"

"Within Our Gates" runs through July 8; "Brought to Light" runs through July 6.

Wren Halle Berry, Robert Townsend, Debbie Allen, Babyface and others from the worlds of black filmmaking and entertainment gather in Acapulco, Mexico, June 24 to 29, it won't just be for the pleasures of partying at the Mexican resort. Sure, there will be parties galore, along with a comedy show, a celebrity fashion show, industry networking, sun, sand, shopping, and probably the occasional display of acute divanes -- but all these will merely serve as background to the first-ever Acapulco Black Film Festival. "The festival," says director Warrington Hudlin (The Great White Hype, Boomerang), "will present the best of international, classic and independent black cinema, providing an occasion to honor excellence in this important genre of American cinema."

Hudlin is the president of the Black Filmmaker Foundation, a nonprofit organization in New York City established in 1978 to assist emerging African-American filmmakers, and he is the curator of the film program (which includes a special presentation of Bleeding Hearts, Gregory Hines, directorial debut, as well as Fled, Girl 6 and Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored). He is also curating the festival's three panel discussions (whose subjects are the future of black women in American cinema, the role of the motion picture soundtrack, and the relative prospects of actors, comedians and rappers). Director-actress Debbie Allen (Out of Sync), director Julie Dash (Daughters of the Dust, Four Women), singer-songwriter Babyface, director Euzhan Palcy (A Dry White Season, Simeon) and actress Salli Richardson (Sioux City, Posse) are among the panelists.

Director Robert Townsend, whose most recent release is B.A.P.S., will host the Acapulco Black Film Festival, and actress Halle Berry will be honored for her outstanding artistic achievements. The parties will be cool, too.